TruSet is Building the Foundation of Trusted, Accurate Data

TruSet’s Ethereum-based marketplaces help users collect, validate, and share business-critical reference data.

In today’s information intensive landscape, trusted, accurate data is the foundation of any business decision. For traditional financial securities, reliable reference data is critical for investment, trading and post-trade settlement, and portfolio management and processing. In the emerging token ecosystem, participants also need data they can trust to make investment decisions, manage token-based portfolios for financial return, and assess consumer tokens for use on blockchain-based dApps.

Much of this business-critical data, however, remains either unstructured, inaccessible, or available only at high cost. In the financial services industry today, market participants are at the mercy of large data vendors who make reference data machine-readable — that is, analyzable and actionable — but at a high price and with insufficient levels of quality. In the token ecosystem, critical reference data is scattered and disjointed, with no existing sources of high quality, structured data.

With over 60 years combined in the reference data space, the TruSet team knows the pain points of the finance system, and we’re starting to recognize them in the early days of the token ecosystem. Our mission is to create a new model that resolves this data dilemma for the future.

Data Dilemma: Reference Data Today

In the financial services industry today, critical reference data is derived from unstructured textual sources, including regulatory filings such as bond prospectuses. The current approach to accessing machine-readable reference data for traditional assets such as fixed income securities relies on large data vendors who convert unstructured data into machine-readable data. Not only are these data sources expensive and restricted by the vendors who own the IP, but oftentimes, data files contain errors that customers must identify and correct themselves. Customers rarely send these corrections back to the vendor, leaving countless others across the industry to find and correct the same errors on their own.

With the emerging token-powered economies, the good news is that a fair amount of critical data is already accessible and verifiable within the Ethereum blockchain. However, much critical data is not captured in the blockchain and instead may exist (or not!) in a variety of unstructured, non-standard, and unregulated sources, including white papers, websites, blog posts, marketing materials, and other project or entity documentation. The token ecosystem is replicating the problems that exist in the legacy financial world: once again, critical data is sitting in unstructured sources, and the community needs a trusted, machine-readable source of information.

The TruSet Solution: Community-Validated Data, Maintained on Ethereum

TruSet is creating multi-sided marketplaces on the Ethereum blockchain for users to collect, validate, publish, and commercialize business-critical, machine-readable data without the intervention of vendors or service providers.

As a community-operated resource, TruSet can better ensure quality and accuracy because validators of the data are actual market participants. By creating a foundational layer of trusted and machine-readable reference data, the TruSet community will establish a new, primary source of truth for industry ecosystems and create opportunities for innovation and efficiency in global markets.

The first two marketplaces that TruSet will enable are the traditional financial services ecosystem, which needs financial asset reference data (e.g. bond terms and conditions), and the emerging blockchain project and token ecosystem. For traditional assets such as fixed income securities, TruSet’s blockchain-based platform creates a much simpler industry workflow that, as with most blockchain solutions, cuts out the need for central intermediaries — in this case, the traditional reference data vendors.

To incentivize the critical and value-generating behavior on the network — publishing new data, publishing updates and corrections, and validating that the information is correct — TruSet will incorporate a system of commercial incentives that reflect the value of the contributions made by the participants in the collective effort to deliver a “golden record” set of reference data.

Every customer of fixed income reference data, from large financial institutions to fintech startups, stands to benefit from the lower total cost of ownership, reduced usage restrictions, and more accurate data provided by the TruSet marketplace. These customers include global and regional banks, custodian banks, fund administrators, asset managers, risk analytics providers, fintech companies, and regulators. Marketplace participants may choose to simply consume the data already validated by the community, or become contributors who not only consume data, but help generate, validate, and maintain it.

TruSet is also building the foundation for structured and machine-readable reference data for all blockchain-based tokens and token projects. This shared data set will be a resource for the entire crypto community. Both trusted and community-validated, this data can be used not only to power investment and trading analytics but also to facilitate the back office processing of portfolios. By establishing this core data as the foundational source of truth about tokens and projects, TruSet has the potential to serve as the basis for product innovation in the emerging token-driven financial services ecosystem.

Every participant in the emerging token ecosystem will benefit from trusted, accurate token data provided by the TruSet marketplace, from token projects who want to promote their token sale to institutional investors building token portfolios to dApp customers who need to buy consumer tokens. The TruSet token data marketplace participants may choose to simply consume the data already validated by the community, or become contributors who not only consume data, but help generate, validate, and maintain it.

Whether you need trusted, accurate reference data for traditional financial assets or tokens, there are many benefits for participants in TruSet’s reference data marketplaces:

• Community-owned data. The blockchain network takes the place of the traditional reference data vendors, consolidating the reference data generated by the data producers into a structured data model. The data is community-generated and community-owned, freeing it from vendor IP ownership and usage restrictions.
• Trusted disclosure reports. Token projects can publish their data for validation to provide a trusted disclosure report for investors and regulators.
• Crowdsourced error correction. The blockchain’s consensus mechanism enables marketplace participants to collectively identify and correct errors. Errors are corrected once for everyone.
• Golden Record. Once the network has reached consensus that a reference data record is correct, it is recorded in the blockchain as an immutable, accurate, and trusted “Golden Record” of machine-readable data. A full audit trail of all changes over time is available.
• Shared access. Every TruSet user can access the set of trusted, accurate records they need and feed it into their automated processes via APIs.
• Rewards. Data publishers and validators are rewarded for contributing to the growth and maintenance of TruSet data.
• Ecosystem growth. With trusted, accurate data, the token ecosystem can develop more robust and sophisticated analytics, processing software, reporting, and smart contract tools.

The Foundation of Trusted, Accurate Data

TruSet is using blockchain technology to rethink how information intensive industries collect and maintain the data that users need to execute business, evaluate products, manage assets, and unlock value. Quality data is essential for any industry. We envision that the TruSet solution will enable community-operated marketplaces in other ecosystems beyond financial securities and token data.

As we move toward a commercial launch, TruSet will be running a series of testing programs with early users from the token community — token project leaders, investors, and crypto enthusiasts — to get feedback on the TruSet platform and to start generating community-validated reference data on tokens and token projects. If you are interested in participating, visit truset.com to sign up for more information.

We believe that business-critical reference data belongs to the industry participants who create, correct, and consume it. TruSet is empowering communities to self-organize in order to publish, validate, and consume this data as a community-owned resource. We look forward to building the future of trusted, accurate data together.

Visit truset.com to learn more about our solution, and follow us @TruSetData to stay updated on our progress.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.